


What Happened At The Wine

by Fontainebleau



Category: Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Education, Gen, The Wine Dance, Worldbuilding, flyting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:55:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21837832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/pseuds/Fontainebleau
Summary: An account given by Heeding of the Obsidian, Archivist of the Exchange at Wakwaha, of what happened at the Wine between Acorn of the Blue Clay and the man whom others named Hunter.
Comments: 22
Kudos: 32
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	What Happened At The Wine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luzula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luzula/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, and thank you for such great prompts for a book I love! I've taken two of the ideas in your letter and combined them into one story: I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

To understand what happened at the Wine that year in Wakwaha you must understand the man who was at the heart of it. The middle name he had taken for himself was Numbers Dancing, though other people would not use it: they called him Hunter. At that time he made his home in the Yellow Adobe host-house of Wakwaha, spending his time chiefly at the Exchange. He took no part in the songs and dances of planting, though he was a man of the Yellow Adobe, or in any art of making, and he went little to the heyimas; he was not much esteemed either in his House or in the town.

How had he come to live this way? I spoke to Windflower of the Madrone Lodge in Ounmalin where Hunter was born, and she told me what she remembered of his childhood. Hunter’s first name was Berry, and he grew up in Three Buzzards Over the Mountain House in Ounmalin, a child like any other. His father Mica was a cheerful lively man, skilled in the Wood Art, and his mother a quick, neat woman called Deermouse who was a singer of the Black Adobe Lodge: he was their only child, but he grew up with his cousins in the house, doing as all children do – following his parents as they planted and gathered and tended the animals of the household, and running around the town with the other children and the dogs, playing games of chasing and hiding. 

From the animals of his family he learned to feed and to herd the goats and sheep, and from his parents to gather, to cook and to sew, and when he was old enough he went to the heyimas to begin learning the songs of sorting and of the world, and the stories and songs of his own House. Berry was curious and quick to learn, and as he grew he liked most to be at the heyimas, sitting and studying: he was fond of the histories and maps which the Oak Lodge shared, he learned to read and speak in TOK, and he questioned Black Ewe who had been on many journeys with the Finders Lodge about the way people spoke who were not of the Valley. He walked a little on the mountain, but when he was not learning with his House he was most often in the town, at the Oak Lodge to see the making of ink, or sitting where the women of the Serpentine were making a feather cloak for the World Dance, or watching a Miller mending on a fusebox. In this he was like many children, Windflower, said, it is good for a young mind to be open, and for a child to go where she will and learn with all things. 

In the summer of his eleventh year the words came to Berry which were to change his life’s pattern. At the time of the Water when the sunflower seeds were ripe his mother Deermouse sent him to the town’s gathering-place for the harvest, and Berry went with an ill grace. The work of gathering is slow and requires concentration, and he was not the first boy to be impatient at it, filling his bag carelessly so that he scattered the seeds for the ground squirrels and jays to carry off. This day he worked for a little, then stood dreaming among the nodding sunflowers, tracing with his finger the whorls of their seeds.

Old Sunup who was gathering along the same row came up beside him, laughing to catch him in idleness; she set down her own bag and asked him, ‘Show me what you have found.’ Berry showed her the seedhead, how the rows grew larger on smaller, gyring outwards, and Sunup said, ‘It is often so in nature. See,’ and she took him to where a willow was growing and plucked a twig of it. ‘Count how the leaves are set,’ she told him. ‘Tree, flower and fern dance to the same measure,’ and she said that if he searched out one of the snails in the creek he would see that it was true of the turns of its shell also. 

Sunup meant no more that to show him a true thing, saying heya for the patterning of the world, but it was in that moment, Windflower said, that Berry began to fall inward: he could have taken what Sunup showed him and opened his mind to the world, but he took it inwards to keep as his own, and when Sunup had filled her bag of seeds she left him there, counting petals and leaves and making figures in the dust.

From that time all of his interest was in the patterns of numbers. He became dreamy and forgetful in his tasks, walking the fields and creeks of Ounmalin seeking branches and shells to prove Sunup’s claim, and he took his knowledge to the heyimas. There they showed him some beginnings of mathematics, but they cautioned him, ‘It is so, for what it is, but you will not explain the world by measuring and numbering it, only by living it.’ Berry took the learning but not the words; to be singleminded is to be unmindful, it is said, and for him it was true.

When he could find no one at the heyimas to share his passion, for a time he went often to drum with the older men, listening to the rhythm of it and making his own, but he would not learn the gyres or the dance measures, and they soon tired of him. Afterwards he became interested in the weavers and their looms and began to haunt their sheds; they were welcoming, thinking he might join the Cloth Art, but though he would thread the looms and watch as the patterns formed in the weft, he was careless with all else, and when he spoiled a batch of dyed cotton by spilling alum into the vat the weaver Star chased him out. His family had hoped that in his wandering he might find a work of handmind to absorb him, with animals or in the winery or the pottery, and they were patient with him, but in the end Mica said, ‘When a foot won’t fit the shoe, it is the shoe must be altered, not the foot,’ and they sent him to Telina, to live with his aunt and her husband and go to the school there.

The schools in Kastoha and Telina are the largest in the Valley: young people come there from the smaller towns to learn with women and men who know languages or geology or physics or history, following their thoughts as they wish; and if there is a lack of knowledge then the scholars send to the Exchange for what they need -- the work of the school is only to guide, so that when a woman or man draws from the great river of knowledge that is the City of Machines, they can learn to divert enough of a channel to water the mind without inundating it. Soon after Berry arrived in Telina we in Wakwaha began to receive requests for instruction in mathematics, so we consulted the Exchange and sent what we received, books with figures and tables and others with only text. Some I think were too obscure and others too simple, but we sent them all, and others after them; 

At the school Berry found what he was looking for, but in other ways he did not prosper and grow. He had joined the Bay Laurel Lodge as all young men do, but though he went a few times camping with them he saw no purpose in it and made no friends, while in the town he did not join in with the summer plays or the adolescents' other pastimes, playing vetulou or dicing. He held himself aloof, even when the others of his age tried to bring him with them, never going with his cousins to watch the riders at their games or to the evening story-telling in the common place: 'What gain is there,' he asked them, 'in hearing tales of people who never lived, or lived long ago? Only that which is under our hands is real.'

It was not long too before his aunt became displeased with him because he would do nothing for their household. Of course he was an adolescent, and it did not surprise her that he should be unwilling, doing what was asked of him reluctantly and badly, and she was easy with him at first, hoping that time would mend it. When things went on the same she asked her father Standing Heron, a man of Berry's own House, to speak to him, and Standing Heron dealt with him kindly, trusting to reason rather than shame, but though Berry said he would do better and went a few times to hoe in their fields or to work with the vines, he soon tired of it again.

In the end, when she saw that he was determined to avoid her tasks, spending his time outside in the drying-sheds or the workshops, sitting with his books where he would not be seen, his aunt grew angry: it was an embarrassment to her that one of her family should scorn the work of planting and digging, and should empty the store rather than fill it up. Windflower said the whole household had heard her shouting at him, ‘Will your papers make a roof over your head so you need not lie out in the rain? Can you eat books, or bury them in the earth to grow? Can you weave them for cloth or press them for wine? You are an infant.’ After that there was no mending the quarrel between them, and she put his clothes out on the balcony. 

His aunt expected Berry to go back to his mother’s house in Ounmalin, no doubt, but he did not; he came instead to Wakwaha and it was there that I first met him, an awkward young man in undyed clothing, bony and intense. As Archivist at the Exchange I receive messages when they are sent and distribute them, and to help those who wish to make reports or requests, but most of the use of it is men and women asking questions for their own purposes. Some come seeking practical advice on plants or crafts, some want information about other places, or recipes or designs, but others come to carry out larger and more abstract projects, like Gather with his study of architecture, or Winter Geese tracing the bones of the great animals from before. Berry became one of these people, coming to the Exchange on many days to seek information about his patterns of numbers, making printouts of what the City of Machines gave him. 

He had no kin in Wakwaha, or none that he knew, so he went to live in a room at the Yellow Adobe host-house, keeping much to himself. He was not very interested either in women or in men, and the young people of Wakwaha found him as difficult as those in Telina had. He was polite and soft-spoken, but distant, never wanting to talk or to share what he found with others, only to draw out information and sit making his notes on it. At the time of the Sun he went once or twice to the heyimas to listen to the drumming, but the rest he neglected: he was still too young to dance the Moon and he had no family to feast with at the World, and I never knew him to go to the Summer Games or dance the Water or the Grass. But he was a man of the Yellow Adobe, and at the Wine at least he would let himself become part of the town, on the nights when all is reversed –- he would join in the drinking and the dancing and the flyting, and in it he seemed to find something of the friendship that he lacked for the rest of the year.

After he had been there some months he began to have the same trouble as with his aunt: the host-house expected him to cook or clean or work in the town gardens, to build or to craft, but Berry did none of these things. A young man of the Blue Clay, Acorn by name, still in undyed clothing, took it on himself to show Berry the way, thinking it was only shyness that held him back. He took him the first time to help at the grape-harvest where many young people were gathered, joking away among themselves as they worked: Acorn was a generous and open-hearted person who made easy company, laughing when the girls teased him that he should name himself Oak, and showing himself off, strong from carpentry as they splashed in grape-juice at the treading, but Berry was awkward beside him, unhandy at the work and daunted by the jokes and play, and after a while he took himself off alone. 

Next Acorn thought he might do better at quieter work, so he persuaded Berry to come with him while he tended to the goats; Berry certainly talked more on his own, beginning on his patterns and their meaning, and in the end, Acorn said, he talked more than he laboured, sketching in the dust, though how much of it Acorn understood he did not say. 

The third time Acorn came he found Berry sitting with his papers in his room and greeted him, 'So you are here, my brother. Put aside your writing a while: we have a need for strong backs, raising the new roof-beams at Orchard House. You and I should go together.’ 

'I cannot,' answered Berry, gesturing at the page before him, but Acorn took up the paper, thinking he hesitated from lack of confidence in his ability. 'Come. A hard job will go the quicker with more hands; and when the house is built you might go to live there with other Fourth-House people.'

Berry reached for his paper again. 'It will take too long: I do not have the time to give.'

'What are you doing that will not keep?' asked Acorn, gesturing in exasperation at the papers that littered the room. 'These pages will be here tomorrow, or the day after, when the roof is sound.'

'I cannot,' said Berry again. 'My task is here.'

Acorn, angry at his stubbornness, replied, ‘The grasshopper sings in the new grass, but in the summer’s heat he becomes a devouring locust.’ 

It was a sharp comment, but Berry seemed only surprised that he did not understand. ‘At the heyimas those who have seen visions receive care and time to work through their seeing, and it is the same for me. I follow understanding -- I cannot distract myself with work that dulls the mind.’ 

'While we drones labour in the hive?' asked Acorn hotly, though rather than come to argument he swallowed down his anger and said no more, leaving Berry to his figures: but he went after to speak with Farcry, Speaker of the Yellow Adobe.

He was not the first to do so; Farcry had heard one and another of us complaining of Berry as a brother of his House who thought himself too grand to work for the town. As I said, it is my task to oversee the use of the Exchange, and as we have only one terminal for the whole of the Valley there is some business most days - messages to make arrangements for trade or to warn of storm or earthquake, notices of the schedule of the train and information about matters outside the Valley; at all other times the terminal is open to anyone to use. Berry came there often in the beginning, and then most days, and soon it had come to be that he was there each day, and if another person wished to consult the terminal I must ask him to make way. He would do so, but he gathered up his papers with a poor grace, and once he complained to me that Chamise who had taken his place was using the terminal only to look for recipes for succotash, a matter too trivial to displace him. I was irritated, I admit it, that he should afford himself such status, and I told him he could spend the time while Chamise was searching her recipes in hoeing the beans or using his hands to make barrels or to mix the bread in the host-house kitchens, but my words came no closer to him than Acorn's or any other's. He was not a demanding or an aggressive person, but he was stubborn, like a stone in the path, determined that he would have the world the way he wanted it. 

Farcry said he would speak with Berry, and a few days later he met him crossing the Hinge as he returned from the Exchange; he made a soft beginning, asking only, ‘Berry, will you come and drum with me in the heyimas?’ 

When he said this he called him by his first name, Berry, but Berry said, ‘My middle name has come to me; now I am Numbers Dancing.’ 

Farcry, who was an old man, gentle and thoughtful, looked at him in incomprehension.* ‘The people of the Five Houses of Earth dance,’ he told him, ‘and the people of the Four Houses of Sky, born and unborn together, but figures on paper cannot dance.’ 

Berry raised his chin in defiance. ‘This is my name: it is my vision. The figures dance in my mind and I with them.' 

Farcry put a hand on his shoulder, concerned. ‘This is no true vision. You are a man of the Valley, and the Valley is in the world; there is no standing apart from it.’ 

In his words he was as cautious and gentle as ever, but Muskrat, who was Singer of the Blood Lodge and a plainspeaking woman was nearby and heard what Berry said. She was far less patient than Farcry and asked him scornfully, ‘What kind of reversal name is this?’ 

Berry said again, ‘It is my vision: I will find the key, the truth at the heart of all being.’ 

He was very earnest, but Muskrat scoffed at him. ‘This is no middle name, and you are not a man grown but a child still at play. Some men wish to be boys forever, hunting and not planting, puffing themselves up with power and death; they do not let themselves grow into the giving of life. And you are the same, though you shut yourself away inside the Exchange.’ It was she who first named him Hunter, and afterwards people called him that, rather than use the name he had taken. 

And so he went on, Numbers Dancing who had been Berry, his life unbalanced. The work of hand and body he scorned, but thought alone will run too fast: it is the slow work of carving or potting or weaving that lets the mind still and settle. Numbers Dancing was always trying to run ahead, from one pattern to the next, one half-drawn diagram to another, seeking mastery over all things. He kept page upon page of printouts that he asked from the City of Man, covered in his own crabbed writing, hiding them away in his room like a ground squirrel in its winter nest. Though he lived in the town he was as a man asleep, dreaming only of numbers.

\--

I have made a long beginning, but this was the man who fared so badly at the Wine. The first night of the Wine is always for companionship, for drunken play and clowning; the _Doumiadu ohwe_ roam around among the whipdancers, everyone clowns and sings and drinks until they are full of benevolence and friendship, and even the most shy and dignified can find it in themselves to be free and openhearted. The second night of the Wine is a time for truthspeaking, for saying what has remained buried in silence through the year, like the easing of the cork of a fermenting wine-barrel to stop it bursting. Tongues are loosened in the flyting, people say what they have been holding close, exchanging challenge and insult, then on the third day the words are swept up to be purged with the rest of the leavings. 

So it was at the second night of the Wine of my tale. I came down late to the common place where the sawhorses were standing with barrels of wine, because Acorn had come in the afternoon to the Exchange asking to consult the terminal, saying something about the house repairs; I showed him the use of it and waited while he made his request, but he was so long over it that eventually I left him there alone to finish and came down to hear the flyting. 

There was already a crowd at the bonfire in the dancing-place, all holding their mugs and jostling: anyone may join in the flyting if they wish, though it needs a ready wit and a quick tongue to make a contest, but some make it their talent, to throw out a barb which strikes its mark and strikes a laugh from the audience too. That night Spring Creek was there at the fire, and Giver Rose’s son from Sinshan, and Crow, a woman of the Obsidian named for her dark hair and her scowl which frightened the children, the three of them tossing out insults as a challenge.

Spring Creek spotted Redflower crossing the common place, and as he came to the Hinge she said,

> The old turkey-cock comes strutting before the flock,  
>  his gizzard bare and wattly;  
>  run, hens, before you die laughing.

Everyone laughed, and Redflower, who was indeed old and wattly but with still a great conceit of his charms, came stepping up to the fire laughing most of all. Then Crow said to Striving, her sister of the Obsidian,

> Your son sits at the heyimas drumming, and his brother with him,  
>  both pounding on the skin;  
>  but their ears will ring loudest when they get home.

That won a burst of merriment too, but Striving flushed in anger, for she was known to rule her household with a fractious temper. She answered Crow smartly,

> Perched on the roof ridge cawing herself hoarse,  
>  Crow says, ‘My song is the sweetest,  
>  Everyone admires me.’

The crowd shouted their approval, and Giver Rose's son looked about for another target; Numbers Dancing was there, standing at the back of the crowd, and Giver Rose's son said with his eye on him,

> The cuckoo makes itself at home in the jay’s nest,  
>  sitting with its beak open  
>  while the parents hop around.

Everyone looked at Numbers Dancing as they laughed, but tonight was the Wine and he did not stand hunched in on himself as he usually did: though he had no skill in handwork his wits were sharp and he took up the challenge boldly, stepping up to reply:

> Cuckoo sits in a tree, but the hog runs squealing,  
>  eyes always on the ground;  
>  dirt is all he knows.

Some cheered at Giver Rose's son's look of discomfiture, and Crow grinned wide, teeth flashing, for she enjoyed a true contest; she declared,

> Hog roots for acorns, gives hide and meat  
>  But even pigshit is more useful  
>  than what comes out of your mouth.

The crowd had stepped back a little to make a space around the two of them, and Numbers Dancing stood in the firelight, eyes bright with wine and smiling for once as those around him urged him on; he replied to Crow,

> Hog falls to spear and arrow, Coyote snatches the jackrabbit  
>  But the hawk soars above all others  
>  With the clearest eye.

> The men of Ounmalin—

began Crow, but from the other side of the fire a voice interrupted her, 

> Your hunt is vain, the deer already dressed  
>  jointed and hung up to smoke  
>  while you range the forest empty-handed.

Everyone turned to see who it was, Numbers Dancing with them, and there was Acorn, more drunk than I had left him, wearing a leather vest with his hair loose and carrying a rolled-up paper in his hand. I had a bad feeling about what was to happen and started around the fire towards him, but before I could reach him Numbers Dancing began a fresh challenge,

> ‘Your wits are smoked along with the-

Acorn did not let him finish. 'My wits are not smoked: I have taken no reversal name for myself.' He tossed the paper to Numbers Dancing's feet and Numbers Dancing picked it up, holding it to the light of the fire. The audience began to jeer him, for to falter is to lose the contest, but he did not seem to hear them; he raised his eyes to look at Acorn again, a stricken look on his face. ‘This is what – how did you find this?’ he asked, and it was as though the light in him had been extinguished all at once.

'A lucky cast,' said Acorn, fierce and gleeful. 'And here your work is done; you may take a new name again and join us at our labours.'

Numbers Dancing crumpled the paper in his fist, and Crow teased,

> The young owl grows into its feathers, and the jay  
>  But you pluck the grown bird bald  
>  to find what plumage it can grow 

Though it won a laugh it was not the merriment of before, but something more hostile; Numbers Dancing looked at the faces around him, then turned on his heel and strode away into the darkness. Acorn stood for a minute watching after him, then turned back to the fire as Spring Creek began the flyting again.

I did not see Numbers Dancing again that night: when the contests were done I spent the night in the barn gambling, then later kissing with an old friend, and in the morning I awoke there alone with a thick head. I went down to the river to wash and then back to my house to drink some _ahkwet_ **. It was late before the town was stirring much again; it is always the same at the Wine, the adolescents and children quick to appear in the morning and the adults slow to rise; but in the afternoon the Yellow Adobe men began rolling up the old casks from the store to break up and make the fire, and each household brought out what it had to be burned. This is not as is done at the World, when one gives personal items to be buried, nor is it the ceremonial cleaning of the Lodges: at the Wine old things are put out, last year’s dregs: motheaten blankets and wornout harness, broken furniture and spoiled stores, all the useless clutter of household and workshop, heaped up together for the flames to consume. And when the fire is dead and the ashes raked and scattered, then is the time to put quarrels behind and start anew: nothing left but the headache, as the saying goes. 

Soon the bonfire was burning up and people started coming and going with boxes and stacks of rubbish, everyone cheerful – there is something uplifting about the act of scouring, clearing out and starting afresh. I stopped to watch a group of Millers bringing up the old rotten roofbeams from Orchard House and toppling them into the flames with a crash: then coming across the common place from the host-house I saw Numbers Dancing, in his arms a great pile of paper all crumpled together. 

He came to the fire, dropped the bundle to the ground and began feeding the sheets all covered with diagrams and scribbles to the fire one by one, his face set in a cold calm. I was filled with trepidation for him, and went and stood at his elbow, asking, ‘Why are you giving all these writings to the fire?’ 

Numbers Dancing replied, never looking away from the flames, ‘It is trash for the burning. Muskrat was right: I am a child, drawing pictures in the dust, and that is all I ever been. 

‘This is because of what Acorn gave you,’ I said, and I was sorry for the part I had played in it unwitting.

He shook his head. ‘I thought to discover, to understand the way the world is fashioned, but everything is already known and written. I thought to chart the ocean but now I see I was only a minnow mouthing among the pebbles on the river’s bed.’ 

‘If you are the fish, take the word and follow the river's flow,’ I told him, ‘let the life of the water carry you,’ but he paid me no attention, standing there in the heat of the fire dropping sheet after sheet, watching them curl and catch into flame. 

When his hands were empty he stood watching while the fire was piled with other leavings, burning up high, and when all was consumed and the flames died down he stood there still. He watched while his brothers and sisters of the Yellow Adobe raked the ashes fine and carted them away, and when all was done he turned and crossed the dancing-place to go up along the slope of the mountain, the smudges of soot still on his face and hands. 

I thought that he would walk alone for a while, so I did not follow: I thought he would take the hawk’s path, going outward and turning at last to seek a new name. I thought he would return to find Acorn and be friends again, beginning anew, but a day went by and then another, and he did not come back. At the host-house they found the room he had occupied bare and neat, ready for the next guest, and supposed at first that he had turned his back on the Exchange and gone back to Ounmalin to his mother’s house, or back to Telina; but no traveller saw him on the way there, and no word came of him after from any of the towns of the Valley. 

\--

And so my tale which had a long beginning has a brief ending: I do not know what became of the man who named himself Numbers Dancing. Did he leave the towns of the Na to become a forest-dwelling man? Many said it must be so, but would a man who had not learned to shift for himself be able to make a shelter, to plant or fish? Did he leave the Valley to find a place where he could become a different person, down to the Inland Sea or up into the Omorn Ranges? And thinking that I ask, if he had stayed, gone back to his mother’s house or to another town, could he have begun to learn again how to be in the Valley, or would it have shrivelled his soul like a dried bean? 

I have written this tale because I do not think we did well in this matter, we men and women of Wakwaha. We are people of the Valley, and we want all in the Valley to live to one way; if they will not we seek to reason with them, and if reason will not work we try to shame them, and if shame fails too, then we have no way but to drive them out. Numbers Dancing would not take the words of Standing Heron or Farcry, and he would not take the hand of friendship that Acorn offered him, so we shamed him, we people of Wakwaha, but what comes after shame? 

Berry who became Numbers Dancing was not a violent person like the Warriors who would spread sickness among us, nor was he a person who tried to grasp or hoard: he was an eager and openminded boy who took a wrong path and became a difficult man and a mistaken one, but was there no way for him to stay among us? Is there no place in our dances for the man or woman who would dance alone?

I cannot say that I have an answer: we cannot have people in the Valley who try to separate mind and body, making themselves poor while others must give to them, just as we cannot have those who would let more children than two make them parents, or who would seek war and fighting; but I think it is a failing in us that we could not find a way to teach such a man, and that the only time he could find a place in our dances was at the Wine when all is reversed and the world made other as the head spins. May it be that his journey is a gyre after all so he will return to us, at the next Wine or one after; perhaps I will see him among the whipdancers, arms outstretched, or standing across the fire sharing the wine from the barrel, part of our people once more.

* In Kesh the word 'dance' has deep spiritual connotation: at the World Dance all living things join the great dance of being, the Houses of Earth and Sky together. To claim that ideas of human invention may dance is a reversal, and a disturbing idea.

** _ahkwet_ : a traditional hangover remedy made with herbs and brandy.


End file.
